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LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins – Sean Carroll podcast w/Dr. Chandra Sripada (preposterousuniverse.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Do LLMs "think" in a similar way to humans? Or is it totally different?

Maybe it's a good idea to listen to someone who publishes papers on this very subject, and is a professor of both philosophy and psychiatry and directs an Institute for Cognitive Science. That person is Dr. Chandra Sripada and his insights are fascinating.

Sean Carroll (interviewer, scientist and science communicator) says this interview made him lean towards the answer being "yes, they think like humans" whereas previously he favored the opposite view.

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[–] [S] 0 points 2 months ago (1 child)

all the talk about LLMs looking like they are “thinking” is based purely on vibes rather than reality

You seem to ignore the quantitative, evidence-based studies mentioned. Ex: https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.155.pdf

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    I already posited that LLMs may perform lower-level thinking. Also, in the reference you linked to read their third stated limitation. Perhaps one day some kind of AGI will do "higher-level" aka more realistic thinking... but not yet. Which, I want to add, is not entirely relevant to their utility to us as humans.

    Talking about "thinking" gets us distracted from what can actually be done, though if we do want to do it then we'd need to come up with a working definition of what "thinking" actually is.

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